An Investigation into Setting Head Parameters in English as a Head-initial Language from the Minimalist Perspective

L1 Use and Language-Related Episodes (LREs) in an EFL Setting

Pair and small group work is infrequently welcomed in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes under the assumption that students tend to use their first language (L1), which is considered detrimental to learning the new language. From sociocultural perspective, however, students’ first language is claimed to play the role of an important psychological tool and can facilitate the learning pr...

Revisiting Quotes from Educational Perspective: An Inquiry into the Multifarious Applications of Grand Quotes in English Language Pedagogy

Merge, Conflation, and Head Movement: the First Sister Principle Revisited

Head-movement is something of a conundrum in modern syntactic theory. At the beginning of the 1990s, it fit beautifully into the system of assumptions that were gradually coalescing into the Minimalist Program. The Head Movement Constraint of Travis 1984 was unified with other constraints on movement as an instance of Rizzi’s 1990:11 Relativized Minimality, the first overarching vision of how e...

An Investigation into the Effective Factors in Comprehending English Garden-Path Sentences by EFL Learners

The present study aimed at highlighting the possible effects of age, proficiency level, and the structural composition of Garden-Path (GP) sentences on EFL learners' comprehension. 80 Iranian EFL learners were recruited from the initial pool of 114 participants based on the results of an English proficiency test; 40 advanced, and 40 intermediate learners were selected. Moreover, two age...

Making sense of EFL teacher agency: Insights from an Iran case study

This investigation set out to look into the issue of teachers’ exercise of agency in the Iranian EFL context. More specifically, as part of a larger study, it reports on the ways two Iranian Ministry of Education teachers make sense of and operate in the country’s educational setting under the demands of a centralist system of education. Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson’s (2013) framework of teach...